Since alcohol literally dissolves cell membranes, I'd be pretty impressed if they evolved past that impediment. Also remember that those bacteria that 'shit' alcohol are eventually killed off by all that 'shit'. That's why you can't brew vodka, but distill it instead.

I can't see what the impediment there is. It seems like there could be a lot of relatively simple modifications of the cell wall structure that would block alcohol. Why couldn't a bug by chance develop a plastic coating? Plastics are chemically pretty simple, resist alcohol, and can be made from stuff available to bugs.

Because it would have to evolve a plastic coating that still magically performed all of the functions of the original cell membrane. It would be kind of like saying why can't human evolve a plastic coating over their lungs to defend against inhaling acid fumes. You would block what was killing you at the expense of...well...killing you in a different and horrible way.

While I have seen plastics act as an osmotic filter, and I have seen other plastic like materials that can perform gas exchange, I have not seen one manage both at once, and certainly not while maintaining a surface tension and selectively passing larger molecules AND acting as a barrier to alcohol.

- Mycobacteria (as those causing Tuberculosis) have thick reinforced waxy cell walls, which can withstand alcohol, for example.- P. Aeruginosas also protect themselves (polysaccharids and biofilms) and have evolved to be able to digest quite a lot of organic compound. They'll resist alcohol, and try drinking it too.- not a living bacteria, but lots of bacterial spores can withstand a crazy vast amount of abuse, and stay unharmed (that the whole point of spores).

Such organisms consume food and excrete alcohol until the ambient concentration is too high for them to tolerate any longer. After years of selective breeding some yeasts have been produced that can tolerate up to about 22% ABV but it doesn't seem to go much higher than that.

How many days could you take a shit in your living room until you could no longer tolerate it? I doubt any amount of evolutionary pressure could enable you to swim in a diarrhea swimming pool.

Which leads to an interesting philosophical question: Does this mean that I am better-adapted than yeast, or does it mean the opposite?

It means neither, though I'd be willing to argue that it means the opposite.>24% alcohol will kill all but a few non-commercially available yeasts.Unlike yeast, you are capable of swimming around in 100% shit, even though you choose not to.

I had a navy friend who was, fortunately, the 2nd smallest person on the ship. The guy who beat him out for being the smallest had to dive into the septic tank to unplug the drain. Evolutionary pressure, no. Navy pressure, yes.

How many days could you take a shit in your living room until you could no longer tolerate it?

The answer is 12.

I doubt any amount of evolutionary pressure could enable you to swim in a diarrhea swimming pool.

No.... but the pressure of the person behind you pushing you in and your desire to survive at all costs would cause you to swim. Besides, at this point your crapping in your living room. Why do you care about the swimming pool?

Yes, ethanol is not just for drinking, but can also be used as a fuel and chemical reagent. Producing more alcohol resistant yeast is a multimillion (if not billion) dollar industry. There are various ways microorganisms can develop resistance to alcohol. Increase membrane stability (eg increase cholesterol content), increase the ability to cope with oxidation stress (upregulate heat shock proteins, DNA repair enzymes, anti-oxidant producing enzymes), increase the ability to turn alcohol into something less

And in spite of that, they eventually poison themselves in a closed environment. That's why you can only get proof so high without distilling or fortifying in spite of centuries of effort by brewers to improve their yeast.

Certainly single celled life can evolve surprising levels of resistance to various noxious environments, but there are limits. At the edge of those limits, extremophiles must go to such extremes of adaptation that they can no longer compete in a less hostile environment.

When friends taste my homebrew, they sometimes ask me how I got the alcohol in there. I tell them that the yeast eats the sugars, pisses alcohol and farts carbon dioxide. For some reason, that I can't fathom, they loose their appetite for my brew at that point.

Unicellular life does not have an easier time evolving - it's a false concept in Evolution - Here's just the simplest of several reasons why.

First, we have to define what we mean by evolving - let's go with one of the simplest measures - species lifetime. A species either dies without a successor or gives rise to its own successor, which is a new species. For simplicity, a new species happens when the successors cannot still interbreed at all with the original.There are more complicated definitions than tho

No, but overuse of them can lessen our immune system's ability to practice on the nastiness that exists in the world. I would not recommend anything alcohol-based to be used with children who's development is still in progress.

Freeze them. Ideally you don't want to use the freezer you store food in but it works in a pinch. Leave them in there for about two or three days and they should smell better. If that doesn't work, buy good leather shoes (or boots) so they can breathe.

It would be prohibitively expensive, and it probably wouldn't work. You would need to wash your scrubs etc. every day, immediately before starting your shift. If you washed them after your shift, then hung them up or put them in a locker, they could potentially be contaminated again. You can also pick up a pathogen when working with one patient, then carry it on your clothes to the next. If this spray makes garments permanently resistant to pathogens, even that would stop happening. It could cut down nosoco

we could have kicked unemployment down by a couple ten-thousand by hiring people to wash scrubs and keep things clean, and at the same time reduced bacteria in hospitals, which would have prevented countless infections (actually not countless, some people have done studies on this type of thing).

but no. fuck that. lets fire all the janitors and clotheswashers and invent weird new chemical experiments that probably might work maybe, because some investment banker needs to pay-off the maserati he wrecked on h

I freely admit I'm pretty ignorant of microbiology but given the choice I'd wager heavily that boiling water is more efficacious than than a chemical treatment. In fact, I'd go even further and also bet that adapting to such high temperatures will take a lot longer for staph. and it's ilk - we've been using it for quite some time successfully after all.

I once attended a lecture about the many useful attributes of brass (including its bacteriostatic properties) but I still wouldn't recommend it over regular

I freely admit I'm pretty ignorant of microbiology but given the choice I'd wager heavily that boiling water is more efficacious than than a chemical treatment.

We'll agree on "at least as effective," but the problem is that you can't have your hospital staff lounge in vats of boiling water while they deal with patients. It's not like a scalpel where you use it once and throw it into the autoclave. Healthcare workers wear their garments all day.

Much like antibiotics does this not help create resistant germs and ultimately makes some of those dangerous pathogens harder to kill? Even more so since it is constantly in contact with and battle against said pathogens?

Depends on how it works. If it's a vector that some germs can survive, like with antibiotics, then there's a chance for a new generation to be born resistant to it. If it's a physical vector that is incompatible with germ life like how alcohol basically dissolves bacterial cell membranes, then no.

It's like how the human population can become resistant to a particular virus, but no one is resistant to a bullet through the heart.

Scientists have created a thing, made out of atoms, that can PERMANENTLY eliminate any possibility of other atoms being arranged in such a fashion as to inconvenience me? Huzzah! An infinite number of solutions posted to problems seemingly thought to be unsolvable in polynomial time! Mathematics has been defeated! Long live...US SCIENTISTS!

You , sir, are the moron. If you had an IQ big enough to be able to click on the link, you would have noted it's many uses in killing things that want to kill you or at the very least, give you a very miserable few weeks. The socks bit is a fringe benefit and a headline to grab people attention.Because you are clearly simpleton I'll explain it is a a way you cam understand: This is a good thing.

You know how some stop lights have those little spikes on them the keep birds from landing on them and pooping on cars below? I wouldn't say those stop lights are bird free due to "lazy birds". I suspect for this to work at all it has to rely on making the environment physically unsuitable for micro-organisms in a similar fashion. I would like to say I know this, but the article is pretty stingy on details.

I normally don't post on slashdot, but since this is related to my field (I am a chemist) and there have been a lot of comments about how bad this must be because of the possibility of building resistance, I felt obligated to clarify this after looking into it.

As far as anti-microbial substances work, this is about as simple as it gets. All bacteria have cell membranes consisting of a lipid bilayer - it's basically two layers of negatively-charged water-loving stuff attached to a fatty part in the middle that stays away from water. This treatment uses a polymer that can pass through the cell membrane, with positively-charged bits making it inside the membrane. The positively-charged parts on the polymer attract the negatively-charged parts on the membrane and cause it to come apart enough for the cell to die.

Many other antibiotics are based on small molecules that interrupting some metabolic process of bacteria. Bacteria develop resistance by making enzymes that will break down these small molecules once inside the cell. This new method attacks the outside of the cell directly, not something inside the cell. It wouldn't be impossible for bacteria to develop immunity to this, but it would be comparably very improbable.

47 comments and no one noticed that the link was broken? Sure there's a BBC link, but it tells you exactly nothing. Doesn't even tell you what it is. I know slashdotters seldom read the articles, but come on.

Okay here's a semi-secret which shouldn't be so secret. I use something called PitRok [amazon.co.uk] Crystal Deodorant (perhaps try this [amazon.com] if you're US based), but any Ammonium Alum based deodorant will be good. It's meant for the armpits, but I find it works good on feet too. 5 stars on Amazon.co.uk by almost everyone including me.

I only wish I knew about this sooner. It's completely odorless and nonsticky, which is great, but also lasts over a year (you wet its hard crystal tip and apply). Anybody who benefits from this, feel free to buy me a beer or 10 according to how generous you feel.

And its been bothering me. I mean have you seen those hand gels people are always slathering on? They seem to forget the.1% that it doesnt kill. Its like, congrats, you just made your hands a cess pool by removing all the competition a microbe that is already resistant to our best efforts would normally have!
The only thing that nears that level of stupidity would be preemptively dosing all our herd animals with anitbiotics by default. But thats so insanely reckless that theres no way wed ever allow it. .

Wool does this naturally.... it's microscopic physical structure is such that bacteria has a difficult time attaching to it physically. When I switched to wool socks I permanently eliminated smelly feet, and they're much more comfortable even in hot weather. Once again, scientists develop a "novel" solution to a problem nature solved much more elegantly long ago. Wool literally evolved for the explicit purpose in which humans use clothing for: keeping mammals comfortable and healthy in a wide range of clima

As someone else pointed out, this should be being used in hospitals. This probably should not be being used in something as trivial as socks. One of the problems we're seeing with resistant bacteria is due to the overuse of antibiotics. Perhaps we need a multi-pronged approach?

Probably the same black one he wears with sandals. Probably wearing them while telling [people things that clearly indicate he doesn't know WTF he is talking about. you know, when he isn't too busy doing the same thing on slashdot.

Let's see, contribute to the creation of a superbug, or wash my fucking socks? Decisions, decisions...

You have socks just for fucking?

You don't?

Just what I was thinking. If you're at all competent at sex, you gotta have the non-slip pads for traction, and most people would last longer (/more times) with a thick sock due to the blood pressure advantages.

I normally don't post on slashdot, but since this is related to my field (I am a chemist) and there have been a lot of comments about how bad this must be because of the possibility of building resistance, I felt obligated to clarify this after looking into it.

As far as anti-microbial substances work, this is about as simple as it gets. All bacteria have cell membranes consisting of a lipid bilayer - it's basically two layers of negatively-charged water-loving stuff attached to a fatty part in the middle that stays away from water. This treatment uses a polymer that can pass through the cell membrane, with positively-charged bits making it inside the membrane. The positively-charged parts on the polymer attract the negatively-charged parts on the membrane and cause it to come apart enough for the cell to die.

Many other antibiotics are based on small molecules that interrupting some metabolic process of bacteria. Bacteria develop resistance by making enzymes that will break down these small molecules once inside the cell. This new method attacks the outside of the cell directly, not something inside the cell. It wouldn't be impossible for bacteria to develop immunity to this, but it would be comparably very improbable.

Although mr AC described the generic anti-microbial action of the chemical on the bacteria, the breakthrough is really how you can "spray" the anti-microbial chemical to stick on-to things w/o blending the anti-microbial chemicals into the materials during the manufacturing process.

Basically this is the anti-microbial polymer technique described by the wiki that I pointed to in my original posting. You embed your anti-microbial chemical (in this case polyethylenimines or PEI) into a N-alkyl polymer, mix in